10 Best Campy Horror Movies Of All Time, Ranked

Camp is a difficult word to nail down. In its truest sense, camp is an attitude, defined by a sense of giddy humor laced with irony, excess, and artifice, and often from a feminine perspective. Over time, that definition has been expanded and altered to a broader umbrella term for anything that qualifies as outrageously over-the-top, and either deliberately or unintentionally "bad." Lists of the worst movies ever made typically make "worst" and "camp" interchangeable — which isn't entirely accurate, but also not entirely incorrect. Movies like "Plan 9 from Outer Space," "The Room," and "Madame Web" may not all qualify as 100% legitimate camp, but all can be considered as such, depending on which definition of the word you embrace.

All genres have camp titles — there are camp dramas, comedies, musicals, and even horror movies. Horror, in particular, seems to lend itself to camp more than some other genres. It is, after all, about excess and artifice and bizarre, hard-to-believe scenarios. Following is a ranked list of 10 horror movies that wholeheartedly embrace the various aspects of camp (and if you're wondering, "hey, why no 'Rocky Horror Picture Show?'" well, it's more musical in horror trappings than actual horror, despite the title).

10. The Abominable Dr. Phibes

Deliberate camp is a difficult line to walk. Too much emphasis in any direction and the end result leans into parody or absurdity. Such were the conditions facing "The Abominable Dr. Phibes," a 1971 horror-comedy starring Vincent Price as a scientist who seeks revenge on the physicians who failed to save his wife during an operation. The scheme, inspired by the Biblical Ten Plagues of Egypt and featuring deaths by cold, rats, and exsanguination, is itself a throwback to camp-heavy pulp horror, and director Robert Fuest leans hard into that aesthetic while also nurturing some comic elements.

Fuest was a former production designer, which informs the film's unique visual style. "Phibes" is set in the 1920s, and the costumes and sets all draw on period sensibilities, but taken to the obsessive extreme of illustrator Edward Gorey's darkly Gothic cartoons. Phibes himself is a traditional villain, given to masks and playing the organ, and disfigured after a car accident left Phibes unable to speak save through a Victrola. But he's also a hopeless romantic, dedicated to his late wife and offering fatherly affection to his silent assistant (Virginia North), who indulges Phibes in an ornate tango. The collision of the horrific, the quirky, and the humorous fuels the camp elements of "Dr. Phibes," and helped make it one of Price's best films and a memorable entry in '70s horror. A sequel, "Dr. Phibes Rises Again," followed in 1972.

9. Feast

Like Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" film series, John Gulager's "Feast" generated a trilogy on the strength of its gutbucket gore and hyperkinetic pace, as well as devilishly plotting which continually rocked audiences on their heels. Featured on Season 3 of "Project Greenlight" — where Gulager showed remarkable calm in the face of boorish producer Chris Moore — "Feast" hinges on a siege scenario, with patrons at a desert bar beset by seemingly indestructible monsters.

Much of an offbeat cast that includes Balthazar Getty, Eric Dane, Judah Friedlander, and Jason Mewes die particularly ugly deaths at the hands of the creatures before Krista Allen's tough waitress steps up to settle the score. The violence is extreme to such a cartoonish degree — faces are ripped off, heads dissolved and smashed, and virtually every victim is eaten alive — that this element alone would push "Feast" into camp territory. Gulager also matched the intensity of his kills with camerawork so frenetic that it borders on hyperactive; Raimi's most frantic scenes in "Evil Dead II" seem positively meditative by comparison.

There's also a wicked sense of mischief to the proceedings. Gulager twice introduces characters who are clearly indicated as the film's leads — Eric Dane and Navi Rawat are, in fact, named Hero and Heroine — only to kill them off moments later. He clearly delighted in setting up traditional horror scenarios and then pulling the rug out from under the viewer time and again.

8. Hausu (House)

The title location in Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 fantasy "House" is haunted, but it's like no ghostly mansion before or after it. There is a malevolent spirit, but it prefers to manifest itself as everyday objects  — a light fixture, a portrait, and in the film's most memorable scene, a piano — that attempt to kill and (quite literally) devour a septet of teenage girls who have come to spend the summer there. The admittedly bizarre plot synopsis does not fully encompass the over-the-top weirdness at play in "House."

Obayashi apparently drew inspiration for "House" from his adolescent daughter, who provided him with a list of things she found frightening. That childlike perspective, which shows a lot and explains nothing, infuses every aspect of "House." The seven girls are each defined by a sole trait (Prof is smart, Mac is hungry, and Gorgeous is, well, gorgeous) and who behave with a naivete that's somewhere between cartoon character and softcore fantasy object. The world around them is steeped in Day-Glo colors and the supernatural phenomena is rendered in deliberately crude effects (stop-motion, video FX), like a child might create. The film is frantic and filled with screaming and gallons of blood — again, like a kid's vision of a horror movie. In its best moments, "House" feels like a dry run for "Evil Dead II," but with half that film's budget and Sam Raimi's manic energy at an even more caffeinated high.

7. Motel Hell

An over-the-top gorefest as well as a broad satire of consumerism, the horror-comedy "Motel Hell" received mixed reviews upon release in 1980, with some critics getting the joke and others lumping it in with the slasher films of the period. But even a casual glance at "Motel Hell" shows that it stands apart from the masked killer crowd. The film — written by future "Ghost" producer Steven-Charles Jaffe and his brother Robert — concerns an aw-shucks farmer ('50s cowboy star Rory Calhoun) and his sister (Nancy Parsons of "Porky's") whose smoked meat products have a secret ingredient: Human beings, which they "harvest" at a combination motel/farm/smokehouse. His victims aren't the usual hapless teenagers, but rather a crew of weirdos, including a pair of swingers and a ridiculous metal band (with John Ratzenberger on drums!), who are most likely better serving the world as snacks.

British director Kevin Connor — who helmed such '70s cult favorites as "The Land That Time Forgot" — delivers a horror satire that can satisfy both the grindhouse crowd and comedy fans. The gore is delivered in gallons but the humor never lags, and the whole exercise comes together in a delirious finale which pits a pig-masked Calhoun against his sheriff brother (Paul Linke from "Parenthood") in an duel with comically oversized chainsaws. All this, plus Wolfman Jack as a TV preacher who speaks in tongues.

6. Creepshow

For "Creepshow," director George Romero adopted the lurid color palettte and stylized framing of comic books — and specifically, E.C. Comics' 1950s titles like "Tales from the Crypt" — for his horror anthology collaboration with Stephen King. E.C. earned a reputation for grisly morality plays and morbid humor, which it bolstered with lurid displays of color (plenty of red, of course) and striking panel layouts that enhanced the terror of their stories through exaggerated expressions, off-kilter framing, and mood-saturated backgrounds. Such legendary comics artists as Jack Davis and Al Feldstein crafted the E.C. Comics signature style, which Romero drew upon for "Creepshow" (and which producer Greg Nicotero continues in the TV horror series spun off from the film).

As in the original publications, the comic book effects kick in during the most terrifying scenes in "Creepshow." When Ted Danson and Gaylen Ross's reanimated corpses appear before Leslie Nielsen in "Something to Tide You Over," the lighting and color scheme switches from a natural look to whirlpools of sea green and sickly yellow, while Romero's camera frames them at tilted angles. Adrienne Barbeau's demise at the hands of the creature in "The Crate" is steeped in gory reds and jagged blue slashes. If it seems silly, that's the point: Both "Creepshow" and E.C. Comics intended to evoke a tone that sits somewhere between nightmare and absurdity, something that might make you laugh or scream — or both.

5. Night of the Creeps

"Night of the Creeps" walks a fine line between homage and parody, and to its credit, manages to deliver both within the context of an entertaining and memorably icky horror film. The feature debut of writer/director Fred Dekker ("The Monster Squad"), "Night of the Creeps" concerns extraterrestrial slugs that transform their human hosts into murderous zombies — which puts a serious crimp into a college fraternity's dance party.

Dekker takes a campy scenario and delivers with a straight face, which is aided immensely by John Carpenter vet Tom Atkins ("Halloween III: Season of the Witch") as a no-nonsense cop. He also freely mixes tropes and cliches from '50s alien invasion movies and '80s teen romantic comedies — two subgenres that at first blush, shouldn't work together. But as "Night of the Creeps" proves, there's a lot of common ground between nerds battling frat guys for the girl of their dreams and aliens taking over their victims. The stakes are just higher when the frat guys are possessed by alien slugs.

4. M3GAN

The Blumhouse-produced "M3gan" (which we reviewed here) became a camp horror icon the moment that pre-kill dance number was unleashed upon the internet. The image of a uncanny valley doll performing a TikTok-worthy routine while wearing impeccable fashion and an "I Don't Care Do U?" expression before butchering Ronny Chieng seemed like the apotheosis of camp in its purest form: Deliberately playful, ironic, and artificial, with emotions ratcheted up to 11 and an unmistakably feminine vibe. "M3gan" hit all those buttons like a sledgehammer, and became a major hit in 2022.

Much has been made about "M3gan's" appeal to one of camp's key audiences: LGBTQIA+ viewers, who elevated her to the pantheon of Gay Horror Figures alongside Annabelle, Octavia Spencer's Ma, and the Babadook. Justin Kirkland, writing for The Daily Beast, detailed why the film drew in that demographic: M3gan has what he calls "that thing that happens when you go to a party as a queer person and you finally clock the other queer person that's in the room. You want to hang out with M3gan because y'all have something in common. Yeah, you want to do that stupid dance with her. You want to be friends with someone who's willing to go to bat for you (sometimes literally with a bat)." Apparently, viewers still feel that way about the homicidal fashion plate: "M3GAN 2.0" (no relation to the hilarious "Saturday Night Live" sketch of the same name) is slated for release in June 2025.

3. Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Commitment to a gag defines the camp qualities of "Killer Klowns from Outer Space." The 1988 horror-sci-fi-comedy, produced and directed by the special effects designers The Chiodo Brothers, operates on a slim premise — evil aliens that resemble clowns wreaking havoc on Earth — and milks it for every possible drop of humor, shock, and weirdness imaginable. The Klowns' array of lethal tech perfectly sums up the film's willingness to go for broke with its comedy: There's the popcorn cannon, the balloon attack dog, the cotton candy cocoons, corrosive pies, and even armored clown cars. The list astonishes because of the depths of ridiculousness it reaches, but also for the sheer inventiveness the Chiodos show in transforming silly toys into murderous weapons.

Plenty of low-budget horror comedies or spoofs attempt the same level of inspired lunacy in "Killer Klowns" — the Asylum's entire output of the most ridiculous mockbusters aims for this tone — but most, if not all, don't understand that a goofy premise alone doesn't cut it. There has to be some wit behind the rubber monsters and weird scripting, which is why "Killer Klowns" remains a cult-camp classic after almost four decades, while these wannabes litter the lower ends of streaming services.

2. Evil Dead II

Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead II" is not only one of the best camp-cult films ever made, but also one of the most influential. Dozens of stateside and international films have adopted its frenetic camerawork and slapstick tone — if Raimi hadn't made "Evil Dead II," then films like "Cabin in the Woods," Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive," and "Shaun of the Dead" might not have been made (to say nothing of the "Evil Dead" franchise itself and even Raimi's "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," to a certain extent).

It's easy to understand why so many films would want to copy "Evil Dead II" and the "Evil Dead" franchise. It's relentlessly inventive from a visual perspective; Raimi's camera zooms, roars, and scuttles with abandon, treating the laws of moviemaking (and gravity) with total disregard for maximum impact. It also goes for broke in the gore department — this is, after all, a film in which its protagonist saws off his own possessed hand with a chainsaw, a corpse dances a pas de deux with its own severed head, and a character accidentally swallows an eyeball launched from its socket by a foot stomp. Above all, "Evil Dead II" is outrageous and inspired, both in terms of its humor (which draws freely on classic Hollywood anarchy like Looney Tunes and the Three Stooges) and plotting. How else to describe a film which begins as a remake of its 1981 predecessor and ends by sending hero Bruce Campbell to the Middle Ages?

1. Troll 2

The backwards virtues of 1990's "Troll 2" have been extolled in numerous reviews, features, YouTube videos, and one amusing documentary, "Best Worst Movie," which recalled the Italian-made comedy-horror film from the befuddled cast's perspective. But is "Troll 2"— which concerns a family's fight against vegetarian trolls, and has nothing to do with 1986's "Troll" — camp or pure ineptitude? It's difficult to say: Director/co-writer Claudio Fragasso and co-writer Rossella Drudi have claimed that the film's most bizarre moments were deliberate. That might explain elements like Deborah Reed's goblin queen Creedence, whose over-enunciated, goggle-eyed performance is often cited among the film's lowlights. The same goes for young hero Michael Stephenson saving himself from the plant-loving trolls by eating a baloney sandwich.

Of course, much of "Troll 2's" humor is also unintentional, and the result of production snafus, not least of which was the fact that the Italian crew spoke little English, which made communicating with the cast of amateur and professional actors challenging. But it's that confluence of elements — weird, overly theatrical performances and non-actors colliding in a script that no one seems to understand — that has fueled the enduring cult/camp status of "Troll 2."